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By  David Craig, on April 17th, 2012 You might have woken up this morning, looked out at the driving rain and wondered how an island – land surrounded by water – renowned for its miserable rainy weather could be short of water. The politically-correct BBC tells us that it’s because we had a dry winter. Bollocks, it’s really because the supposed water regulator Ofwat is so spineless and incompetent. Britain’s water companies waste almost a third of our water – almost one billion litres a day – through leakages. Ofwat, set up in 1989, is meant to regulate the water industry. In its first 14 years, it did not issue a single enforcement order obliging water companies to reduce leakage. In the last 9 years, it threatened to fine Thames water once but then backed down after Thames said they would take action. Naturally, nothing much happened. The only thing Ofwat seems to do is to keep allowing water companies to raise their prices.
The water companies claim that it would be too expensive to reduce leakage. But these companies, which are mostly foreign owned, regularly make profitc of 25% to 30% in Britain, while regulators in their home countries limit their profits to the 5% to 10% range. Meanwhile, Ofwat does nothing. The Public Accounts Committee has regularly criticised Ofwat for its inaction, but Ofwat still does nothing. It’s time to scrap Ofwat, declare water supply a strategic national asset which cannot be owned by foreign companies, force all foreign owners to sell their UK businesses and set a maximum profit level for water companies of say 10% as well as setting targets for investing in reducing leakage. But, of course, the Government will do nothing, the garbage at Ofwat will do nothing and we will continue to have water shortages even though we’re drowning in the stuff.
By David Craig, on April 16th, 2012 After over 10 years of war, the US and Britain seem to have achieved absolutely nothing in Afghanistan. The corrupt, incompetent Karzai puppet government is loathed by most Afghans. And now Karzai is talking about holding elections in 2013, before the foreign troops leave in 2014. In this way, he can resign and scarper with his tribe off to Dubai with their stolen billions before the Afghan people string them up for being thieves and traitors. It will then be left to his successor, if anybody wants the job, to rule the country till the Afghan freedom fighters and their Taliban mates take over in 2014.
Then the Taliban will drag the country back into the Stone Age. But so what? It’s not our problem. If Afghans threaten us or help our enemies, we should bomb them from thirty thousand feet so we don’t risk our troops’ lives. But if they want to have a civil war or massacre their own people – that’s their prerogative.
Meanwhile our lying PM David Liar Cameron and various military chiefs claim that we are ‘making progress’ in Afghanistan. Please don’t waste our time with your lies Mr Cameron. Nobody believes a word you say any more. With your claims about “we’re all in this together” and about Cornish pasties you bought in a shop which closed five years before you visited it, you have become a national embarrassment and a joke.
By David Craig, on April 15th, 2012 For legal reasons I have to be a bit careful here. In May 2005 I sent an email to the Bank of England. A few days later, I received a reply and was informed that a senior official at the Bank would be phoning me. The reason for me contacting the Bank of England was that I had received information from a former forensic accountant who had worked with Fred Goodwin at Deloittes. This individual claimed to have documentary information about some financial shennanigans Fred Goodwin had been involved in while at Deloittes. For legal reasons, I won’t detail these shennanigans here. If any journalist wants to contact me, I can provide the necessary documentation. The key point here was that, if this forensic accountant’s information was correct, then it would have been clear back then that Mr Goodwin was not a fit and proper person to run a major bank.
Unfortunately, although I told the senior official at the Bank of England where he could get the documentation which would possibly reveal much about Mr Goodwin’s business ethics, the senior official decided to take no action. I wonder if this senior official’s decision not to act on my warning lost British taxpayers about £45bn.
By David Craig, on April 14th, 2012 There may be some honest spread-betting companies. There may even be people who can make money spread betting. But my experience investigating spread betting while writing Pillaged suggests that spread betting is a massively profitable scam. When writing Pillaged, I opened several practise spread-betting accounts. These allow you to learn how to do spread betting without risking real money. Over two months, I managed to lose about £30,000. Luckily it was not real money. However, this did let me find a way to regularly win.
So I decided to take the plunge and open a real spread-betting account. Although I made many losing bets, I managed to close these before my losses got too large and so for two weeks, by carefully controlling my losses and by making larger winning bets I won between £50 and £100 a day every single day. But after I had pocketed about £1,000 things suddenly went horribly wrong. I got into several losing bets and found that I couldn’t close the bets, so my losses were much higher than they should have been. At first the spread-betting company denied there was anything wrong and suggested there must be problems with my Internet connections. But when I provided evidence proving that it was the spread-betting company which was preventing me closing losing bets, one customer service employee admitted the truth – the spread-betting computer system was deliberately blocking me when I made losing bets because the spread-betting company considered that I was betting in a way which was “unfair”.
So there you have it – if you lose while spread betting, the companies will happily take your money. But if you find a way to win regularly – even just small amounts – the company cheats to make you lose. The whole thing is a con. Don’t get robbed by spread-betting firms.
By David Craig, on April 13th, 2012 Every few months Yahoo seems to “upgrade” their email system. And it seems that every supposed “upgrade” makes their email system worse. After one upgrade, it was no longer possible to save emails as drafts. After another “upgrade” I had to type my whole email address and password every time I wanted to check my mail. After the latest “upgrade”, if I copy an email so I can send it to several people, I have to completely reformat the whole email every time I use it. And so on and so forth. Moreover, Yahoo proudly proclaims to me every time I go on email that they have made me the “master of the digital universe”.
Dear Yahoo – I don’t want your hopeless “upgrades”, I don’t want to be a “master of the digital universe” – I just want my email to work properly. Couldn’t you just manage that? Last week, Yahoo announced they were firing a thousand or so employees because their business is going down the khazi. I can understand why nobody wants to use them. But perhaps if they have less people, then they’ll have less time to do all their pointless “upgrades”. That would be nice.
By David Craig, on April 12th, 2012 Not being an economist I may not have fully understood the disaster the useless, lying euroleaders are causing, but I think it goes something like this: 1. The PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) are all well and truly bankrupt. 2. Merkel would never get away with making German taxpayers bail them out, so she has to disguise the bailout. 3. Using EU taxpayers’ money, the European Central Bank (ECB) gives a trillion or so to European banks at just 1% interest. The banks then use this to buy the PIGS’ bonds. This drives down the interest the PIGS have to pay and makes it look like they are not quite bankrupt. It also makes it look like European banks have increased their assets with lots of “solid” country bonds. 4. The one trillion runs out, but the PIGS still need to borrow lots more money. So the PIGS have to sell bonds on the open market. Because of the high risk of default, they have to pay high rates of interest. 5. Now that interest rates for PIGS’ bonds have gone up, the bonds with lower interest rates which the banks bought with taxpayers’ money become worth less. The banks then have to ‘mark to market’ – record the bonds on their balance sheet for the lower price they could sell them rather than the higher price they paid. 6. The end result is that the PIGS are still bankrupt, but now the banks’ balance sheets look much worse because all the government bonds bought with taxpayers’ money are worth less.
The whole sitation is a total cock-up, European taxpayers have lost hundreds of billions (though they don’t realise it yet) and Germany will still have to bail out the PIGS. Never in history have so many people been led by such a bunch of incompetent, lying blithering idiots.
By David Craig, on April 10th, 2012 I watched some dreadful football over the last few weekends. Team after team faffed around for 90 minutes apparently without a clue as to how to score a goal. (By the way, passing the ball backwards is not the best way to score). But the one thing our overpaid, thuggish footballers were good at was constantly fouling each other. One of the best scenes was Liverpool goalkeeper headbutting a player from some other team as Liverpool floundered to defeat.
One way of controlling this thuggish behaviour might be to fine footballers for each foul and give the money raised to charities dedicated to training young unemployed people. For example, for every yellow card, a footballer should have to hand over one month’s wages to the charity. For every red card, it could be three months’ wages. This would raise a huge amount of money for charity and it might help our arrogant footballers concentrate on playing the game they are paid so much to play rather than kicking, tripping, punching and headbutting their opponents or diving spectacularly and dramatically just in front of their opponents’ goalmouth.
So come on, useless FA. Take some action. Oh sorry, I remember now why the FA won’t do anything. Aren’t the FA a bunch of arrogant, money-grabbing, incompetent fools? Didn’t they manage to squander over £30 million hiring and then paying off some of the worst team managers in the world to look after the hopeless, selfish, spoilt flops who play for England? So much for that idea.
By David Craig, on April 9th, 2012 It seems like half the BBC news at the moment is taken up by yet more trouble in Africa – sham elections, coups, civil wars, brutality and of course a famine or two. It is now over half a century since most African countries got their independence and in almost all cases, while the rest of the world has developed, most African states are poorer now than they were fifty years ago. This is a stunningly consistent picture of stupidity, corruption, greed and violence. Many African countries have followed the same six-step process. 1. A brutal, corrupt, incompetent regime takes over. 2. They plunder the country’s wealth while investing little to nothing in schools, hospitals, roads, rail, water, electricity etc. 3. Faced with grinding poverty, families have large numbers of children in the hope that a couple will survive and be able to look after their parents in their old age. 4. The population expands faster than the economy leading to massive environmental destruction and even worse poverty. 5. Wealthy countries provide more aid to Africa than any other region of the world, but most of this is stolen by African leaders and either wasted on imported luxuries or sent into offshore bank accounts. 6. Eventually there is rebellion, civil war and a new government of greedy corrupt fools takes over and then we’re back at step 1 again.
Historian Niall Ferguson once wrote that the normal routine of Haitian politics was “theft, murder, intimidation, corruption”. Though in the Carribean, Haiti is culturally an African country and the description of “theft, murder, intimidation, corruption” could apply to most African states.
Many African countries have huge natural resources and massive amounts of fertile land. They could be amongst the richest in the world, instead they are usually the poorest. Nigeria could be as wealthy as Norway, instead it is a hell-hole of poverty, violence, corruption and waste. It’s not colonialism or drought which are responsible for the disaster that is Africa, it is the African people themselves. Until they start changing their behaviour, sadly we are wasting our time and money giving any more help to Africa.
By David Craig, on April 8th, 2012 One of Blair’s many vacuous promises was to increase the number of people graduating from Britain’s universities. He did this by allowing every third-rate and fourth-rate polytechnic and further education college to apply for, and usually get, university status. Poly teachers were delighted – becoming a university overnight gave them massive pay rises and lots of extra jobs as they extended one-year and two-year poly courses into three-year supposedly “degree-level” courses. For example, I am informed by journalists on my local paper that students taking a three-year university course in journalism follow almost exactly the same syllabus as they did when they took their 40-week journalism course at the local poly.
As with most of Blair’s worthless policies, this has proved to be a disaster – now that university fees have been hugely increased, many students find they are paying for three extremely expensive years tuition to get what is basically a one-year poly diploma. What universities should be doing is of course cutting many three-year former poly courses back to two or even one year. But this won’t happen because greedy, lazy poly teachers would lose status and even jobs.
The only people who can cause change are students. So, as your lecturers threaten yet again to strike over their incredibly generous pensions, look at them and ask yourself ‘am I really getting a valuable three-year degree or are my lecturers just poly teachers pretending to be university lecturers?’ If so, then take action, demand a reduction in fees, blockade your campus, buycott classes – don’t let yourselves be screwed by greedy poly teachers pretending to be what they are not.
By David Craig, on April 7th, 2012 Here we go again, another almighty cock-up at HMRC’s computer system. At the busiest time of the year – the end of one tax year and start of the next – HMRC closes its useless computer system down for four days. Only the incompetent fools at HMRC could decide to do routine maintenance when taxpayers have most need of the computer system to work. But in all the stories about HMRC’s complete incompetence, one name is cleverly kept out of the press – that of French computer systems company Cap Gemini. As far as I know, Cap Gemini have been running HMRC’s computer systems for many years and still are. In spite of blunder after blunder the avaricious Cap Gemini manage to keep their lucrative contract with HMRC without anyone in power questioning why Cap Gemini’s repeated failures keep getting rewarded by more government contracts.
By the way, dear HMRC, if you wish to collect more tax revenue and reduce the deficit, what about looking into how Cap Gemini’s bosses organise their tax affairs. In particular you may find an investigation, particularly into how some French gentlemen organise their tax affairs, to be most productive. On the other hand it may not be. Who knows?
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